Live
Bint Mbareh (PS/UK)
Bint Mbareh (Arabic for: »yesterday’s daughter«) is a sound researcher with a curiosity about the superpowers of communal singing.
Her initiation into music came through her research on rain-summoning practices in Palestine when doing research to combat the myth of water scarcity pushed by Israeli settler colonialism. Beyond summoning rain, she learned that the songs help people build a relationship with their environment and specificities of different times of year, and to communally determine how to share resources (and time) fairly. Such practices can still be evoked and actively used, rather than only remembered.
She now studies death and rebirth as analogies for necessary upheavals, still looking for these significations in Palestinian landscape, especially the shrine of Nabi-Musa (AS), the prophet Moses. She was Cafe Oto’s Youth Music Resident in 2021.
https://instagram.com/bintmbareh/
Photo by Korneel De Feyter
Live
Cluster Lizard (UA/DE)
Cluster Lizard is an interdisciplinary mixed media project that fuses experimental electronic music with analogue and generative video, photography, abstract paintings, and computer graphics. The project is created by Dmytro Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka, two Ukrainian artists now based in Berlin, who have been active in the Ukrainian experimental music scene for over 20 years with solo aliases Kotra and Zavoloka, respectively.
The conceptual inspiration for Cluster Lizard was driven mainly by futuristic ideas from prominent science fiction writers, experimental and radical sci-fi movies, abstract painters, futuristic techno-activists, and many other great artists who offer their view of the future, near and far, social and esoteric, technical and spiritual. In harnessing all these different ideas and voices, Cluster Lizard create a dystopian soundtrack for a bizarre sci-fi movie that was not filmed yet.
https://clusterlizard.bandcamp.com/
https://vimeo.com/clusterlizard
https://www.instagram.com/cluster_lizard/
https://www.facebook.com/cluster.lizard/
Photo by KURØ
Live
Kamilya Jubran & Werner Hasler (FR/CH)
Kamilya Jubran & Werner Hasler unravel a musical universe of possibilities through their imaginative interpretation and improvisation – a unison of complementary timbres and cultures, the complicity of verses, and modes and languages that confront each other as the duo communicating their respective origins and contemporaneity.
Musician, composer, and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals), collaborates with long-standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics). Hinging on a 20 year-old practice of interrogating their own hearing and expression, research and desire, the alchemy of their exchange unveils a voyage into a unique, unheard sound.
https://everestrecords.ch/wp/release/wa/
https://kamilyajubranwernerhasler.bandcamp.com/album/wa-2
Live
Khyam Allami (IQ/UK)
Khyam Allami is an Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, researcher, and founder of Nawa Recordings. His artistic research and practice explores experimental composition and improvisation based on, and inspired by, the fundamentals of Arabic music and culture.
During the US/UK-led invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003 Allami found himself to be »out of balance « with himself and his history and in 2004—aged 23—began to study oud, Arabic, and Iraqi music with Iraqi Oud master Ehsan Emam in London. He rapidly became a performer of international renown. His 2011 debut solo album, Resonance/Dissonance was widely critically praised and led him to high profile performances across Europe and the Arab world including the BBC Proms (UK), WOMAD (UK), Supersonic (UK), CTM (DE), Incubate (NL) and Irtijal (LB).
Recent works include »Requiem for the 21st Century,« an immersive Oud-based installation for Opera North (UK), »Ma-a aba ud mena gin Ma-a di-di-in,« a string quartet for JACK quartet (US), and »Apotome,« a collaborative project with Counterpoint Studio which was awarded the inaugural Isao Tomita Special Prize at Ars Electronica 2021. Allami holds a BA and Masters in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London and a Ph.D. in composition from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University (UK).
https://khyamallami.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/khyamallami
https://www.instagram.com/khyamallami/
https://twitter.com/khyamallami
https://www.facebook.com/khyamallami2
Photo by Camille Blake
Live
Poly Chain (UA)
Poly Chain is the project of Sasha Zakrevska – a composer, curator, DJ, designer, and radio host from Kyiv, Ukraine. Aiming to bring a breath of fresh air into the scene, she carefully delivers ambient and club-ready textures with a hypnotic electro imprint. Her performances can range from majestic and warm, to meditations ending in fractured conditions.
Zakrevska started her musical journey with piano lessons at the age of four, and later continued with a psychedelic rock/shoegaze band where she began to explore the world of synthesizers. She began performing under the alias Poly Chain after moving to Poland in 2012. A prolific curator – taking part in various Polish parties like Syntetyk, Brutaż, Dype, Trips for Lonely Hearted and Flauta – Zakrevska also began composing tracks for theater and museum performances.
After she returned to Ukraine in 2018 she continued her curatorial activity in the form of a radio show titled »Spaceship Tunes,« playing music she enjoys but doesn’t get to play in the club. She released several albums in 2019: a collaboration with Bartosh Kruczyński, named pulses on Into the light Records, and her solo album +/- on BAS.kolektyw, plus a cassette tape album on the label Mondoj. She has participated in a number of Ukrainian parties including Cxema, Osnova, Veselka, and ∄ – the sister of the Standard Deviation label that was launched with her own split release with Nene H. She has also graced the stage at festivals such as Unsound, Upper, Dym, Next Sound Festival, Sanatorium Dźwięku, and more.
https://www.instagram.com/poly_chain/
https://www.facebook.com/polychain01
Light Design & Light Installation
Nindya Nareswari (ID/DE)
Nindya Nareswari is a lighting designer and artist based in Berlin. Her artistic practice ranges from light object and sculpture, light photography, set and stage lighting design, to light art installation.
Experience, material, and space have always been the core elements in Nareswari’s works. She is passionate about experimentation with light and materials in order to study the interaction between light and different mediums, and often plays with perception. Her works have been exhibited internationally including at Berlin Fashion Week, Memphis Gardens in Melbourne, and the National Gallery of Indonesia.
https://www.instagram.com/__nareswari__/
Photo by Jan Thedja
Speakers and Moderators
Moderator
Diana Abbani (US/DE)
Diana Abbani is a historian writing on the social and cultural history in the Levant and a EUME fellow of the Fritz Thyssen foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her research concentrates on music, memory, and language.
Abbani is currently preparing a book that examines the impact of the emergence of the music industry and the entertainment world on local societies in the Levant region. She particularly focuses on alternative narratives and women singers, to uncover the forgotten stories of those affected by sound transitions, global encounters, and local struggles.
She received her doctorate in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University, and holds double masters in History and Political Science from Sorbonne University and the University of Saint Denis in Paris.
https://paris4-sorbonne.academia.edu/dianaabbani
https://themarkaz.org/exile-music-hope-nostalgia-among-berlins-arab-immigrants/
Speaker
Dmytro Fedorenko (UA/DE)
Multidisciplinary artist Dmytro Fedorenko is one of the early active pioneers of Ukrainian experimental electronic music scene, responsible for highly acclaimed experimental music projects, festivals, and art events in the country. His sonic output includes more than 20 years of creating under the alias Kotra, the newer musical entity titled Variát (since 2021), and work as one half of experimental sci-fi band Cluster Lizard, together with Zavoloka. He is also the founder and producer of the label Kvitnu, and a co-founder of art label Prostir.
In parallel to music, Fedorenko is expanding his experiments in the fields of video, photography, and abstract painting. Some of his paintings and photos were used as album covers for his own music albums, as well as releases by other artists. He has also curated numerous international art projects, produced concerts and festivals under banners Kvitnu Fest and Detali Zvuku, and given numerous lectures and masterclasses.
Fedorenko is currently based in Berlin.
https://www.instagram.com/dmytro.fedorenko/
Speaker
Eylaf Bader Edin (SY/DE)
Eylaf Bader Edin studied English, Arabic, and Comparative Literature in Damascus, Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Marburg.
Following his studies in English language and literature at the University of Damascus (2004–2009), he completed his MA at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (Paris 8) in 2014 with a thesis on »(Un)-Translating Slogans of the Syrian Revolution.« From 2015 to 2020, he studied in the Cotutelle doctoral program of the University of Aix-Marseille and Philipps-Universität Marburg. His doctoral dissertation is titled »Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution 2011-2012.« In 2021, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the DFG-funded research group “Figures of Thought | Turning Points” at Philipps-Universität Marburg.
Currently, Edin is a research associate for the research project, SYRASP, and a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. His upcoming book Translating the Language of the Syrian Revolution (2011/12), will be published via De Gruyter in July 2023.
Upcoming book: https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110767698/html
Speaker
Hanna Perekhoda (UA/CH)
Hanna Perekhoda is a Phd student in the Institute of political studies at the University of Lausanne. Her PhD thesis is focused on the territorial issue of Eastern Ukraine and Russian-Ukrainian border in 1917-1922. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine she published a number of articles explaining the historical background of russian-ukrainian relations in Jacobin, New Politics and Contretemps. Her last article, dealing with a question of Putin’s ideological justifications of the war, was published in a collective volume L’invasion de l’Ukraine. Histoires, conflits et résistances populaires.
Speaker
Kamilya Jubran (FR)
Kamilya Jubran grew up in Al Rameh – a palestinian village situated in Galilée, in the north of Israel. Raised by her music loving parents, she was introduced and initiated to classical arabic music , and particularly by her father Elias Jubran – a music teacher and an instrument maker.
At the age of 18 Kamilya made her move to Jerusalem, where she studied at the Hebrew university, and simultaneously explored her new musical pathway by joining Sabreen group-based in East Jerusalem. www.sabreen.org. With the group she recorded four albums and toured in many local as well as international towns and cities. The very rich and intensive 2 decades of constant work with the group urged her to deepen her music research and consequently to shape and reshape her musical identity.
Since 2002 Kamilya lives in Europe, the first move was to Switzerland, then a year later to Paris, where she is based.
In 2014 she founded Zamkana association, a non profit organisation that supports and accompanies original innovative artistic projects, respecting the values of freedom of expression and secularism.
Photos by© Randa Shaath
Moderator
Mariana Berezovska (UA/DE)
Mariana Berezovska is a Ukrainian Berlin-based writer, editor, curator, and co-founder of Borshch magazine. With her deep curiosity for the underground and a sense of community, she has been writing about music and subcultures for publications like Resident Advisor, Das Wetter, Year Zero, Tight, Judas, and DTF among other. Her writing focuses on electronic music but stretches beyond production and the dancefloor and takes a critical look at social responsibility, community, discrimination, inequality, racism, and prejudice.
https://www.instagram.com/mariana_berezovskiiiii/
https://www.instagram.com/borshchmagazine/
Photo credit: Vitaliya Zhyriakova
Speaker
Nino Ugrekhelidze (GE/ES)
Nino Ugrekhelidze is an intersectional feminist activist with over 13 years of experience working with global and grassroots-based organizations to advance gender justice and human rights.
Committed to mobilizing resources for feminist and LGBTQI communities from the Global South, Ugrekhelidze has worked in various capacities with Urgent Action Fund, Global Fund for Children, Bosch Foundation, FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund, and Taso Foundation – Women’s Fund and Research Center in Georgia. Most recently, Nino supported a number of philanthropic institutions and INGOs with funding Eastern and Central European grassroots front-line responses to the war in Ukraine. She studied sociology and gender at Tbilisi State University. Born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia, currently she is based in Barcelona.
Speaker
Pisitakun (TH/PT)
Thai experimental musician and visual artist Pisitakun Kuantalaeng is a purveyor in noise, folding personal loss with the fraught recent political upheaval of his native Thailand. Formerly active in Bangkok and now based in Portugal, his works are based on political speculation and the external and internal frustrations artists are subject to.
Pisitakun’s journey as a solo artist began in 2014 around the time of the military coup d’etat in Thailand, in which freedom of speech and the people’s ability to criticise the Thai monarchy was threatened with more punitive prison sentences. For artists like Pisitakun, the need to be more nuanced in their public output became necessary, with his artworks regularly coming into contact with the police authorities. On his debut album Black Country, released on Chinabot, the mix between industrial textures with marching rhythms and military generals shouting created an ominous work reflecting the contemporary turmoil. Beginning in 2016 and completed in the following year, it is the result of over four years of contextualising traditional music in electronic soundscapes.
In his 2020 album Absolute C.O.U.P., the artists grapples with the question: “Why do we have so many coups in Thailand?” He is among a group of young Thai artists who use oblique playfulness to challenge the ruling powers in the face of censorship and prosecution.
Pisitakun has performed among other at CTM Festival (Berlin, Germany), Asian Meeting Festival (Tokyo, Japan), MEIA (Aveiro, Portugal), Spaziomusica Festival (Cagliari, Italy), Cafe OTO (London, UK).
https://pisitakun.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pisitakun/
https://twitter.com/pisitakun/
https://www.instagram.com/pisitakun/
Moderator
Sana Tannoury-Karam (INT)
Sana Tannoury-Karam is a writer and a historian of the modern Middle East, with a special focus on the cultural and intellectual history of the left in Lebanon during the Mandate period. She also writes on the subjects of memory, exile, and belonging.
She has conducted research on early communist thought in the Eastern Mediterranean during the interwar period through World War Two, including the evolution of communist parties throughout the Arab world, from organic local ideas to strict Stalinism. She has argued for an internationalist moment in the interwar period, contrary to the historiography of the region being sectarian and divided, and explores the politics of global anti-fascism.
Tannoury-Karam’s work has appeared in a range of publications, including the Journal of World History, Rusted Radishes, Legal Agenda, and Trafo-Blog for Transregional Research. She most recently co-edited a volume, The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden University Press, 2020). She is currently a EUME fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien (2020-2023), and an incoming Assistant Professor of Modern Middle East History at the Lebanese American University (2023).
https://www.twitter.com/sanatkaram
Facebook: Sana Tannoury-Karam
Territory Disrupt 